I AM NOT SURPRISED that the death of my beloved 18-year-old, little black cat leaves me feeling the kind of bereavement that I have felt when my nearest and most loved relations and friends have died. She was my friend and daily companion for a very significant part of my life. I've only had one other pet who I lived with almost as long, a parrot whose long line of "owners" started with the mother-in-law of one of my great aunts. After her Paul lived with, to my knowledge, two of my great aunts, my grandmother and grandfather and then with us. I think he died about 16 years after we took him in and I felt very sad but he wasn't nearly as much of a friend as my last cat.
Like David Bentley Hart, I have no time or respect for theologians or others who claim that animals do not have immortal souls. Such as that fat-headed genius Thomas Aquinas, whose most interesting act was not writing his voluminous would-be systematic theological masterwork but when he stopped writing it after he had a profound mystical experience that led him to declare all of his previous work to be "straw." I find him, someone who was certainly steeped in a deep knowledge of the Latin translation of the Scriptures, Jerome's Vulgate (from what I understand he didn't read either Hebrew or Greek) using that language interesting because of the verses in Isaiah that proclaim that all flesh will see the glory of God while comparing human bodies to grass that withers and is no more.
Which leads me to think about the verses in the Scripture I most dislike and discount, Ecclesiastes, which says that human beings and animals end up with the same fate which, in that book, ends at death. For the life of me, I don't see how anyone ever, when they were choosing from the many, many books to include in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures included that cynical sourpuss who provides so much of the contradiction of so much of the far more inspiring Scripture, certainly in both the Jewish Scriptures but ever more so the Christian Scriptures. I have little to no use for Aquinas so I haven't looked up to see how he may have squared that with his other claims. David Bentley Hart points out that he was quite able to contradict himself on any number of things, including the claim that effective change of spiritual status was impossible in spirit when he believed in the story of the fallen angels. I don't know how the Church squared such an idea with the inspired idea of purgatory.
And all that leads me to what I understand was the first Pope to make a quasi-dogmatic declaration that Animals do not have immortal souls, one of the worst of the modern Popes, the odious Pius IX. Among other things he is infamous for refusing to endorse the Italian society to prevent cruelty to Animals because to endorse kindness to Animals would contradict his vile conception of such things, probably based on the offically official theology of Aquinas.
The traditional view that Animals have no immortal souls gives, among its reasons, that Animals can't reason so Animals can't have immortal souls. I have to conclude that anyone who believes they can't reason has never spent much time with Animals because it's often far clearer than it is with many People that mammals, birds, and other Animals demonstrate reasoning abilities when they are presented with novel situations which they figure out far, far, faster than they could learn from trial and error unaided by reason. Even in her last week my cat was figuring out, almost immediately, the novel means that I gave her for getting up on her favorite perch, of me, for the first time in her life, moving it into the sun for her (it didn't take two days of me doing that, for the first times, for her to make it clear to me it was time to do that). I've seen cats do that, I've seen dogs do that, I've seen chickens do it, I've seen squirrels do it and chipmunks are even faster. And with the many, many wildlife camera feeds and videos that have been posted online in the last quarter of a century, anyone who thinks wild animals can't reason has to be an amazingly stupid and clueless Person.
An even stupider reason that I understand was shared by a number of Catholic theologians, was that Animals and plants have no immortal soul was because they were made for human beings to use and there would be no use for them in heaven so they have no immortal souls. What, I would have asked them, were we to make of the very large majority of Animals who are never encountered by any human beings and who live out their lives unmolested and unexploited by the only animals known to be capable of intentional sin and evil? You might forgive an Augustine or Aquinas or those whose ideological commitment insisted that their opinions had a weight that was, supposedly, reserved for the words of Jesus but, certainly, now that we know how long the line of life on Earth has been, the idea that all of those trillions of living beings and creatures (plants being creatures as well as animals - human beings, too) who lived for the vast majority of the history of known life before there were any humans, the large majority of them having no contribution made to the eventual emergence of human beings, anyone who depends on that idea today is stupider than a young-earth-creationist who is also a flat earther and a Republican-fascist dispensationalist, antisemitic Zionist.
I know for an observed, experienced fact that many Animals, I would say most of those I've known intimately, are morally superior to most of the People I've known. And what evils they do exhibit come with an innocence that all but the youngest or least intelligent People can be believed to share with them. I have never known animals to show cruelty or evil actions that can, by any measure, come up to the tsunami of evil that can come from People acting in concert or, as we can see before us right now, small groups of those given enormous power through the combined forces of evil with cruel and evil intent. And those who are the most cruel and hateful among us are presented as paragons of moral righteousness, moral authority (religious as well as civil) and "legitmate" exercisers of power who others are morally depraved enough to believe they and others are morally obligated to follow. No wild dog pack hunting down a deer to inflict such fear and pain as their nature as wolves hunting for food compels them to do are as cruel as the majority voting in the last American election and those they empowered to do such enormous evil - which the secular civil stand-ins for religious authority, the Constitution, the law, the judges and, worst of all, the "justices" give their would-be moral approval of. And the would-be religious authorities, in so many cases, most of whom I'm sure would hold with the superstition that Animals are not loved enough by God for him to give them immortal souls, are all the evidence anyone would need to know that Animals are our moral superiors.
I am of the opinion that one of the most important figures in Christianity, Paul, had his life changed by a near death experience, or likely two of them. First there was the experience on the road to Damascus where he intended to do evil to the disciples of Jesus which led to his conversion. The second one was when he was stoned by those who didn't like his preaching and was left for dead by them, only for him to survive and be rescued by his friends. I think his entire and enormously effective career is based on that near death experience, about which, more in a minute. I think his experience led him to believe he had a direct connection to Jesus and which seems to have given him a radically expansive view of the Gospel and the good news (so I'll give you this relevant passage from the Good News translation).
8 I consider that what we suffer at this present time cannot be compared at all with the glory that is going to be revealed to us. 19 All of creation waits with eager longing for God to reveal his children. 20 For creation was condemned to lose its purpose, not of its own will, but because God willed it to be so. Yet there was the hope 21 that creation itself would one day be set free from its slavery to decay and would share the glorious freedom of the children of God. 22 For we know that up to the present time all of creation groans with pain, like the pain of childbirth. 23 But it is not just creation alone which groans; we who have the Spirit as the first of God's gifts also groan within ourselves as we wait for God to make us his children and[c] set our whole being free. 24 For it was by hope that we were saved; but if we see what we hope for, then it is not really hope. For who of us hopes for something we see? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
Passages such as that, read directly in the original Greek, led many in the Eastern church to see the Resurrection of Jesus as having not only implications of glory for human beings (those who Paul and everyone else in the Scriptures were talking to and, mostly, about) but for the entirety of Creation, as Paul addressed in that passage in Romans. I think that those universalist theologians such as Gregory of Nyssa, his sister Macrina, Issac of Syria, etc. get it far more than many in the Western European tradition, especially those who depended on Latin translations of the Greek that was the mother tongue of the Greeks. I'm not familiar with the Aramaic Scriptures, so I can't relate those to the universalism that is far more often found in the Eastern Churches. I am encouraged to read more and more Roman Catholic theologians, even some Popes are veering towards universalism, not only the limited and stunted universalism of Humans (why else would Catholics have the insight of purgatory if not for that) and also for Animals. One of my favorite living theologians Elizabeth A. Johnson has explicitly said that and has the brilliant insight that it is a necessary understanding if we are to save the natural world from those who believe it is there for us to destroy in our exploitation of it. Another I've just come to start reading and listening to is the Methodist David Clough who is very much worth listening to and who articulates a Christian veganism which I find about as convincing as I did the Chief Rabbi of Dublin who had such an influence on my adoption of veganism. Though I didn't force my cat to convert, I lived with that moral ambiguity for her sake though if I could be convinced I could provide a cat or dog with an adequate vegan diet, I might try it. Though at my age I think adopting another pet longer lived then a rat would be unfair.
Unlike, for example, the late great Catholic thinker and theologian Hans Kung, I think the testimony of those who credibly report having had a near death experience is a valid thing to consider. I don't mean those who have made talking about it and endlessly scribbling about it a career, I mean those who, by a change in their life for the better who say they have seen the other side. From what I read, about a quarter of those who come back report having encountered their pets who are happy to see them and who, in at least some cases, let them know it's not their time to pass over. Of course there's no way to know that, though there are reports of People saying that about pets they don't know died while they were held to be unconscious. There are also reports of those who are near death and who die, having death bed experiences of seeing their loved ones, People and Animals, come to see them off. I don't think those are of knowable reality, though I've been with dying People who clearly had those experiences, one of whom had their blood oxygen level and other vitals taken and who the nurse said were perfectly normal and who, otherwise, had all their marbles. Unlike many, especially academic writers on such topics, I think those provide valid evidence on which we can legitimately base our beliefs. I think it's as knowable as any historical accounts, many of which we have only second or third hand reports - INCLUDING EVERYTHING IN SCRIPTURE. I certainly think if you are going to take what Paul concluded from his vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus as the basis of a huge swath of Christian theology then contemporary near death experiences are validly taken as evidence.
I will also say, since I know this will likely be read or mischaracterized by scoffing atheists, that what they claim about what happens after death is uniformly UNEVIDENCED. When given the choice to draw conclusions about something I have not experienced or witnessed, I'll always take what there is evidence for as producing validly held beliefs that totally unevidenced claims drawn from a priori ideological choices can't be held to have. That is not unrelated to the theological positions I slam above which are, as well not based on any evidence but are based on commitments to ideological, philosophical authorities. I think that the thinking of a David Bentley Hart, Elizabeth A. Johnson or David Clough are far more likely to produce good than the alternatives, atheist or religious. I'll put my lot in with the radical universalism that holds out the hope I'll see my cat again, happy in eternity over the dismal dismissal of her goodness as existentially futile.
